New dinosaur fossil in Alberta

Michael Ryan describes the badlands of southern Alberta Canada which are rich in dinosaur fossils. Recently a new horned dinosaur was discovered, named Albertaceratops nesmoi which belongs to the Centrosaurinae, one of two subfamilies of the horned dinosaur family Ceratopsidae. It was the size of a modern rhinoceros and was vegetarian. There is continued speculation regarding how the animal would have used its horns.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: Canada has one of the greatest troves of dinosaur fossils ever found.

Bob McDonald: Most people don't think about Canada as a source of dinosaurs, but in Alberta in the west where Dr Michael Ryan has had some amazing luck recently, he's found a creature quite new to science.

Michael Ryan: Well, if you're my age, which is pushing 50 now, and you read about dinosaurs as a young boy, the two places in the world that you were reading about was either Mongolian China or else North America and specifically southern Alberta. Some of the best and most famous dinosaurs have actually first been discovered there.

Robyn Williams: Why? What's it like? What's so special about it?

Michael Ryan: Beautiful desiccated badlands, sort of rolling barren hills that are grey and white in colour, and as you walk along through them they have variegated purples and blacks of coals coming out through them, and frequently, very frequently in fact, in some areas it's so abundant that you can't not step on them, there are dinosaurs bones popping out.

Robyn Williams: Heaven! What have you found most recently?

Michael Ryan: Most recently we made the news with a new horned dinosaur, a new ceratopsian called Albertaceratops, an animal that some of your listeners might think looks a little bit like triceratops but it actually belongs to the other sub-family of horned dinosaurs which is not supposed to have long horns over its eyes.

Robyn Williams: I see. We're talking about creatures which are pretty damn big.

Michael Ryan: They are. The animal that I'm talking about probably would be the size of a modern rhino but have a large shield-like plate coming out the back of its skull and big horns coming off over either eye.

Robyn Williams: So why is it significant that it has horns when it shouldn't?

Michael Ryan: We know from the fact that horned dinosaurs started off as relatively small discrete animals, probably the size of a Labrador dog. It's very common to find animals like Protoceratops over in Asia, they have no horns on their head but they do have a nice little frill. And in North America we get these two flavours, these two sub-families, one like triceratops with these long horns and the other, the centrosaurs, without it. This new animal shows that we actually have a sort of a missing link between the two sub-families. The new one comes out at the very base of the centrosaurs, and we now have been able to put another brick in the wall of assembling what horned dinosaur evolution looked like.

Robyn Williams: I'll ask you about the horns and what they signify in a minute, but what were the circumstances of the discovery?

Michael Ryan: I'd actually been looking for this for some time because I had been shown material that was privately owned by a company called Canada Fossils who legally buy and collect material from across the border in the United States and then assemble dinosaurs and sell them, and they had shown me a tabletop full of very interesting material that had come from just across the Alberta-Montana border in Montana, which I identified as probably a new type of horned dinosaur but there wasn't much to it, and I thought if I explored in the same rock beds in Alberta I might find something. So I found a very broken piece of lower jaw with a volunteer and I was disappointed that there wasn't more to it but I said let's dig around and see what's there. My volunteer dug in the ground and 30 seconds later he said, 'This looks like a horn.' So I said, 'Don't break it and don't dig there anymore, dig beside it.' And then he found another horn lying beside that. Within about an hour we'd uncovered the better part of the face of this beautiful dinosaur.

Robyn Williams: In such a short time, how remarkable. And you kept digging and found...how much of it?

Michael Ryan: We only found the skull. As typically happens we usually take our trucks into the areas where the badlands are and you park at one point and you walk up and down three or four of five very deep valleys to get to where you're going, and when you're at the furthest point away from your vehicle, almost out of water, that's when you find something. So we were the top of a sort of pointed hill in the badlands, and there probably was the body of this dinosaur here 100 years ago but modern erosion from wind and water had probably carried it away down through the river valley.

Robyn Williams: So you extracted it, you looked at the horns and you thought this can't be right.

Michael Ryan: That's pretty much it. We actually used a cherry-red Porsche car hood to pull it out on. We made a field jacket out of plaster and burlap to cover the skull with, flipped it over on top of a skid that we needed and we just happened to have this cherry-red Porsche car hood from the local wrecker, and we took two lengths of mountaineering rope and we had about 30 people pulling on either side, just like they built the old pyramids, and we dragged this thing about a mile to our truck, and once we got back...

Michael Ryan: They would have been. Looking at their teeth, the parrot-like beak at the front of their mouth suggests that they probably clipped off small saplings or small growing trees or branches and then processed these things by just chewing them backwards like a mill through the grinding teeth at the back of their jaws.

Robyn Williams: It makes you wonder what is behind that huge investment in the horns which presumably are very heavy.

Michael Ryan: And unlike animals like moose that we have here in North America, those things aren't shed annually, they are indeed solid pieces of bone that the animal carries throughout its life, so it's a very good question, and historically there's been a couple of different ideas. One was that they were for defence. The Triceratops which appears about 65 million years ago at the end of the age of dinosaurs probably did use its big heavy horns to fight off animals like t-rex, but we're thinking that the animals that appeared 10 or 20 million years before that, certainly Albertaceratops falls in that time zone, were probably using these things as signalling devices for mating. Very much like big-horned sheep, the animals with the biggest horns may have been able to control the biggest female harem for breeding purposes.

Robyn Williams: I heard somewhere a rumour that they may even have been used to make sound.

Michael Ryan: Certainly not the horned dinosaurs. They could not have used their horns to make sounds because they are solid instruments, but if you look at the duckbill dinosaurs that have those unique crests and some long tubes coming out the back in the case of Parasaurolophus, those are hollow and connected to the mouth and nasal cavities, so they could have actually blown air through them and made some very low, deep sounds.

Robyn Williams: Ah, that's where I heard it, yes indeed. So they would have also presumably been involved in mating sounds.

Michael Ryan: In fact the new incumbent curator of dinosaurs in Toronto, soon to be a PhD, David Evans, a former student of mine, did a beautiful piece of work on that about two years ago, and if your listeners are interested you could do a Google search on Parasaurolophus and David Evans and hear some great stories and even some noise about dinosaurs making sounds.

Robyn Williams: Hear some of the sounds themselves, yes. Okay, now you've found the top half of this specimen, are you going to look for more in that particular area?

Michael Ryan: Indeed we are. I formed a group called the Southern Alberta Dinosaur Research Group, and we have a five-year plan of which we're heading into our third year this year, and one of our plans is to indeed find the body of this thing. For most duckbilled dinosaurs and for most horned dinosaurs, when you actually take the head off the body, the body does not actually tell you much about the actual identity of the animal. The bodies are pretty generic, the heads are what are different. But we don't have a lot of good bodies for horned dinosaurs, so any ones that we could find and if we could find a complete one it would be a real coup.

Robyn Williams: Michael Ryan, any change that we'll find something like this sort of dinosaur in Australia?

Michael Ryan: If you had asked me that ten years ago I would have said probably not, but there have been some intriguing bits of bone that have been recovered in the last couple of years. There is some material that appears to be protoceratopsian and I suspect that as we actually range over the a lot of the barren interior of Australia where there's beautiful outcrops we will indeed find something unusual and perhaps even a horned dinosaur like I've got.

Robyn Williams: That's very pleasing because I was once told a year ago by somebody at the American Museum of Natural History in New York that there are no dinosaurs worth looking at in Australia. I was shocked.

Michael Ryan: About 20 years ago I had an opportunity to talk to one of the palaeontologists there and he showed me the entire dinosaur collection from Australia, which fit into a suitcase, and I know now that there are many, many more specimens, and I think as we explore new areas within Australia that people have just not bothered to look in before we're going to find some amazing things.

Robyn Williams: We live in hope. Michael, thank you.

Michael Ryan: Thank you very much.

Bob McDonald: Dr Michael Ryan, who's a Canadian based at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Guests

Michael Ryan

Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology The Cleveland Museum of Natural History Cleveland Ohio USA